The approaches described in this section could be pursued, but are not necessarily approaches that have been previously conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated herein, the approaches described in this section are not prior art to the claims in this application and are not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section.
Delivery of content across the Internet has been accomplished in several different ways. Content servers have been used to deliver content directly to requesting clients. As the content servers became overloaded from the traffic demands, mirroring of the content across multiple servers were implemented. Mirror servers were added as client traffic increased beyond the capacity of the installed base of mirror servers.
As mirroring became costly to the content providers, caching content in content delivery networks (CDN) became popular. The content provider's content was distributed among caching servers across the Internet. The caching servers were shared among multiple content providers and operated by a CDN provider. The caching servers were essentially file servers that served different types of files to client systems.